How Modern Design Fails Older Consumers

Don Norman is the author of one of the classic works on design, Design of Everyday Things, and a former Apple VP. He's also 83 and finding that modern design is failing him and a whole generation of consumers.

In a Fast Company article, he rails against what he sees. Don't be mislead by the title of the article. What he describes is a problem that affects more than just the elderly.

Do not think that thoughtful design is just for the elderly, or the sick, or the disabled. In the field of design, this is called “inclusive design” for a reason: It helps everyone. Curb cuts were meant to help people who had trouble walking, but it helps anyone wheeling things: carts, baby carriages, suitcases. Closed captions are used in noisy bars. As Kat Holmes points out in her book Mismatch, all of us are disabled now and then. Some of us have permanent disabilities, but all of us have suffered from situational and temporary problems. When outside in the sun, the text message that just arrived is unreadable: wouldn’t it be nice if the display, whether cellphone, watch, or tablet, could switch to large, higher contrast lettering? Are elderly people handicapped? Maybe, but so is a young, athletic parent while carrying a baby on one arm and a bag of groceries in the other (and perhaps trying to open their car door). Ride-share bicycles and scooters cannot be used by people who need to carry bulky packages. Everyone has difficulty hearing people in noisy environments. Noise-canceling headphones are for everyone, not just the elderly. Almost anything that will help the elderly population will end up helping everyone.

I couldn't agree with him more. I constantly find myself running up against bad design that makes my life more difficult. I've reccently unsubscribed from a couple of interesting looking email newsletters because the publishers formatted them in small, light grey type on a white background, thus making them virtually impossible for me to read. It's a small thing, but it's symptomatic of the problem that Norman discusses in the article.

Putting Comments in Code

During my career as a technical writer, I've had to document several APIs in a variety of languages. At Daleen Technologies, we sold the API as part of the product, and I had to learn Java so I could add and edit comments directly in the code. I learned a lot about what to do, and more importantly, what not to do, thanks to some helpful (and occasionally exasperated) developers.

This article by Bill Sourour would have been extremely helpful when I was starting out.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before…

“Good code is self-documenting.”

In 20+ years of writing code for a living, this is the one phrase I’ve heard the most.

It’s cliché.

And like many clichés, it has a kernel of truth to it. But this truth has been so abused that most people who utter the phrase have no idea what it really means.

Is it true? Yes.

Does it mean you should never comment your code? No.

In this article we’ll look at the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to commenting your code.

For starters, there are really two different types of code comments. I call them documentation comments and clarification comments.

Microsoft Working To Help People with Disabilities

Microsoft has announced seven new projects aimed at helping people with different disabilities. Out of the seven, I'm particularly interested in two that should help people with visual problems.

• Massachusetts Eye and Ear, located in Boston, is developing a vision assistance app to aid individuals who are blind or have decreased vision. The app will provide the users with heightened location and navigation assistance.

• Researchers at University of California Berkley are also creating an app for the visually impaired. The app will provide users with audio descriptions regarding their surroundings.

I'm curious about the first item, considering that Microsoft no longer has a mobile platform for apps. Presumably it will run on Android and possibly IOS.

Solving the Cat and Mouse Problem

Here's a simple puzzle that I came across on Boing Boing the other day.

A swimming mouse is in a circular pond. A non-swimming cat on the perimeter of the pond can run four times as fast as the mouse can swim and will always run in the most optimal way around the pond to catch the mouse. The mouse can run faster than the cat. The question: can the mouse get away from the cat? Mathematician Ben Sparks explores different methods the mouse can try.

Give it some thought. It requires only the application of logic and some simple, middle school math. No algebra or calculus is required. 

Some Free SF from the Magazines

Two of the major science fiction magazines have a readers' poll each year for the best stories and articles. The winning authors get some egoboo and a bonus payment.

As a bonus for you, they publish the winning stories online so you can read them for free.  File 770 has the links.

• 2019 Asimov's Readers' Awards
• 2018 Analog Analytical Laboratory Readers’ Awards

I am looking forward to reading stories by David Brin and Ctein, Wil McCarthy, and Rich Larson, among others.

Can CBD Really Do All That?

Now that cannabis is legal in Canada and many US states, there's increased interest in its theraputic properties. It's been used as a medicine for many years, but now there's both commercial and scientific research going on into what it does and what chemicals in the plant are effective.

So far it seems that the most medically useful component of cannabis is cannabidiol, or CBD. It's not psychoactive, unlike THC, so it doesn't get a person high, but it may have many uses.

The New York Times has published a long article about CBD, its history, its uses, and its likely future. Its the best article I've seen on the subject so far, completely free from hype or fear mongering.

Seven years later, cannabidiol is everywhere. We are bombarded by a dizzying variety of CBD-infused products: beers, gummies, chocolates and marshmallows; lotions to rub on aching joints; oils to swallow; vaginal suppositories for “soothing,” in one company’s words, “the area that needs it most.” CVS and Walgreens each recently announced plans to sell CBD products in certain states. Jason David now sells a cannabis extract called Jayden’s Juice, named for his son — one of several extracts on the market, including Haleigh’s Hope and Charlotte’s Web, that are named after children who are said to have benefited from being treated with CBD.

Many of these products are vague about what exactly CBD can do. (The F.D.A. prohibits unproven health claims.) Yet promises abound on the internet, where numerous articles and testimonials suggest that CBD can effectively treat not just epilepsy but also anxiety, pain, sleeplessness, Crohn’s disease, arthritis and even anger. A confluence of factors has led to this strange moment. Plenty of legitimate, if still inconclusive, research is being done on CBD. Many scientists are truly excited about it. The laws governing cannabis and its chemical components have loosened up. And the anecdotes that have emerged from what Elizabeth Thiele, an epileptologist at Harvard, calls the “vernacular” cannabis movement have lent emotional force to the claims made for CBD.

The Best New Features In the Windows 10 May 2019 Update

Microsoft has started rolling out the May 2019 Windows 10 update, so if you're running Windows 10 it may be showing up on your computer one of these days. This article has a summary of the key new features in the update.

My own experience with Windows 10 has been fairly positive, especially after last spring's update, which fixed an issue I had with my PC sometimes taking forever to reboot. As far as the new update, I like the ability to uninstall some of Microsoft's crappy apps (Groove Music, for example), and the new emoji selection dialog. What would be the most useful feature, the Windows Sandbox, isn't available to me because I'm running Windows Home. I may have to upgrade one of these days.

Book Circulation Is Declining In College Libraries

Book circulation is declining at college and university libraries, but it may not be because students are reading less. That's the gist of this article from the Atlantic.

But there is a difference between preservation and access, and a significant difference, often unacknowledged, in the way we read books for research instead of pleasure. As the historian Michael O’Malley humorously summarized the nature of much scholarly reading and writing, “We learn to read books and articles quickly, under pressure, for the key points or for what we can use. But we write as if a learned gentleman of leisure sits in a paneled study, savoring every word.” Or as he more vividly described the research process, academics often approach books like “sous-chefs gutting a fish.”

With the rapidly growing number of books available online, that mode of slicing and dicing has largely become digital. Where students or faculty once pulled volumes off the shelf to scan a table of contents or index, grasp a thesis by reading an introduction, check a reference, or trace a footnote, today they consult the library’s swiftly expanding ebook collection (our library’s ebook collection has multiplied tenfold over the past decade), Google Books, or Amazon’s Look Inside. With each of these clicks, a print circulation or in-house use of a book is lost. UVA’s ebook downloads totaled 1.7 million in 2016, an order of magnitude larger than e-circulations a decade ago. Our numbers at Northeastern are almost identical, as scholars have become comfortable with the use of digital books for many purposes.

I am pretty sure the same trend is happening in public libraries based on the changes I've seen in our local libraries. 

Before Netscape

Some of you reading this blog may never have used an Internet browser other than Google Chrome or Firefox. But the World Wide Web goes back well before those browsers, to 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee released the code libraries that made Internet browsers possible. This article from Ars Technica looks at the very first browsers, including the first one I used, Mosaic. (On second thought, I may have used a text-mode browser before Mosaic, but the memory is dim).

Some years later Berners-Lee returned to CERN. This time he relaunched his "World Wide Web" project in a way that would more likely secure its success. On August 6, 1991, he published an explanation of WWW on the alt.hypertext usegroup. He also released a code library, libWWW, which he wrote with his assistant Jean-François Groff. The library allowed participants to create their own Web browsers.

"Their efforts—over half a dozen browsers within 18 months—saved the poorly funded Web project and kicked off the Web development community," notes a commemoration of this project by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The best known early browser was Mosaic, produced by Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

Mosaic was soon spun into Netscape, but it was not the first browser. A map assembled by the Museum offers a sense of the global scope of the early project. What's striking about these early applications is that they had already worked out many of the features we associate with later browsers. Here is a tour of World Wide Web viewing applications, before they became famous.

The Cost of Owning a Tesla After 200,000 Miles

It seems that there are more advantages to owning a Tesla (and presumably any fully electric vehicle) than just saving money on gasoline. The author of this article calculated his costs after driving his Tesla for 200,000, and he's done pretty well. 

In total, here’s what the Tesla cost to “use and abuse” it vs. keeping it to myself and only driving 50,000 miles:
$79,000 — My purchase price for my used P85 with 35,000 miles (purchased in August of 2014).
−$25,000 — Turo Earnings
−$17,000 — Uber/Lyft Earnings
−$20,000 — Tax Savings
−$25,000 — Current Resale Value (Private Party)
$8,000 — Amount I was paid to own and drive the hell out of a Tesla. Keep in mind, I could have made a lot more as I only averaged 1 Uber ride a day over 4.5 years, and I only rented it seriously starting in 2016. I was having too much fun doing massive 48 state road trips and running my Flagstaff Vacation Rental business to really focus on maximizing the earnings.

Even assuming that you aren't going to try making money with Uber or Lyft, the savings on fuel and maintenance are substantial.

Featured Links - May 26, 2019

Links to things that I found interesting but didn't want to do a full post about.

• The universe may be a billion years younger than we thought. Scientists are scrambling to figure out why. A good explanation of the big, new controversy in cosmology.
• The Most Upsetting Game of Thrones Death Was the Show Itself. This is the best article about the end of Game of Thrones that I've seen.
• How the World's First Digital Circuit Breaker Could Completely Change Our Powered World. This could be a significant development, but I hope they are looking at security for it.
• Bringing New Life to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Lost Designs. Wonderful 3D renderings of Wright's unbuilt designs.
• How Nnedi Okorafor is building the future of sci-fi from Flossmoor. A profile from the Chicago Tribune.
• Free Ebook of Mueller Report Now Available, thanks to the Digital Public Library of America. 

Dead Sound

I saw the Grateful Dead eight times between 1970 and 1992 and one thing was common to all their concerts – they had great sound systems. It was possible, sitting near the back of an arena like Copps Coliseum, to distinguish the sound of individual drums, in stereo, and when Phil Lesh "dropped the bomb", you could feel it in your gut.

It's not well known outside of the sound reinforcement industry, but the Dead were responsible for many of the amplification techniques that we now take for granted – mixing hall sound in stereo, analyzing hall sound to tune the mix, using phase cancellation microphones, using the PA instead of the bands amplifiers for instrumental sound, and more.

CBS has an audio documentary about the sound of the Dead with an accompanying article.

"I mean very early on they got a reputation for having the best sound of any band that was out there touring," Jackson said. "A lot of the other sound engineers copied what they were doing or talked to them about what they were doing and how they were able to isolate instruments, and how they were able to combine instruments in interesting ways in the PA, and give a faithful reproduction of what was actually being played."

The Dead's innovation culminated in the Wall of Sound: more than 600 speakers, 40 feet high and 70 feet wide across the stage.

McNally said it could create perfectly acceptable sound at a quarter mile away.

Unfortunately, I never saw the Dead while they were touring with it. I have heard audience recordings from that period that sound better than some soundboards, so I will attest to its quality. 

Getting Started With CSS Layout

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) have gotten a lot more complicated since they were introduced in the latter part of the 1990s. You can now use them to do animation, complex formatting, and layouts that respond to different screen sizes and formats.

Getting Started wtih CSS Layouts is a guide to the many properties of CSS layouts. It should be helpful to anyone creating a CSS layout from scratch or modifying the generated CSS code from a tool like RoboHelp or WebWorks ePublisher.

Why Google+ Failed

Google is notorious for killing off services that it perceives as not performing well. Earlier this year, they shut down Google+, their attempt at establishing a social network. (It will still be available under different branding to commercial GSuite customers).

A software engineer who worked on Google+, identified only as Talin, has written an article about why Google+ failed. His reasons include some basic architectural choices made at the beginning of the project as well as some that were specifically internal to Google and the way it runs projects.

I used Google+ at the TMX and hated it. The interface was clunky, wasteful of screen space, and lacked basic features (being able to see the date of posts and sort them by criteria like date or user) that would have made managing large volumes of posts much easier. I used bulletin board services in the early 1990s that were easier to use and more sophisticated.

I'm not surprised it failed and this article gives some insight into why it was doomed from the start.

NASA's Full Artemis Plan Revealed

NASA has revealed more details about it's Artemis project to return US astronauts to the moon by 2024. It's an ambitious plan that will require many launches of both NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) and commercial rockets.

And it's going to be expensive.

One thing missing is its cost. NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has asked for an additional $1.6 billion in fiscal year 2020 as a down payment to jump-start lander development. But all of the missions in this chart would cost much, much more. Sources continue to tell Ars that the internal projected cost is $6 billion to $8 billion per year on top of NASA's existing budget of about $20 billion.

It's a reasonably good plan but it will likely never happen. Given the political climate in the US, I can't imagine either a Republican or Democratic administration allocating the necessary funding. 

NASA is in danger of becoming a political football. Democrats are unlikely to support Pell Grants as a source of funding, and some space industry sources have speculated that this may have been a "poison pill" from the White House's Office of Management and Budget to undermine a long-term, costly program. If Democrats wanted to push back in a political way, they could tell President Trump they will only support NASA's lunar landing with Department of Defense funds earmarked for the "Space Force." Under such a scenario, the politicization of NASA would be bad for an agency that has mostly flown above the partisan fray.

Constructing a Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram for a Globular Cluser

Back when I was in high school, I created a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram from a set of data pulled from a star catalog. It was a painful exercise and I think I used several pieces of Bristol board before I got it right.

Now, with the aid of high-resolution telescope images and powerful graphics software, it's much easier, as this video shows.

If you aren't into astronomy, this may not mean much to you, but it's seriously cool.

We're Toast 7

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Climate Change and Environment

• A World Without Clouds. Loss of clouds could make climate change worse.
• Heaven or High Water. How Miami is trying to deal with rising sea levels.
• Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release. It might double. 
• Fox News Is Desperately Trying to Convince Us That Climate Science Isn't Real. The world would be a better place without Fox News.
• Deepest ever dive finds plastic bag at bottom of Mariana Trench.
• Atmospheric Methane Levels Are Going Up — And No One Knows Why. Not good news, considering methane is a much more dangerous greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
• Now Ocean Plastics Could Be Killing Oxygen-Making Bacteria. This is not good.

Politics

• How Sovereign Citizens Helped Swindle $1 Billion from the Government They Disavow. They are a cancer on society.
• The Next Reckoning: Capitalism and Climate Change. As long as corporations are allowed to behave like psychopaths, we are in deep trouble.

Technology

• Technology to End Humanity–And How to Stop It.
• Is Science Broken? Major New Report Outlines Problems in Research. Why we can't have nice things.
• If the Old River Control Structure Fails: A Catastrophe With Global Impact. We had better hope that the Army Corps of Engineers know what they are doing.

How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer

There have been many articles about the Boeing 737 Max disaster published in the last few months, but this one in the IEEE Spectrum magazine, written by a software developer who is also a pilot, is the best that I've seen. It focuses on the critical process and design flaws that led to the disaster, and there were many. But this is probably the most critical.

So Boeing produced a dynamically unstable airframe, the 737 Max. That is big strike No. 1. Boeing then tried to mask the 737’s dynamic instability with a software system. Big strike No. 2. Finally, the software relied on systems known for their propensity to fail (angle-of-attack indicators) and did not appear to include even rudimentary provisions to cross-check the outputs of the angle-of-attack sensor against other sensors, or even the other angle-of-attack sensor. Big strike No. 3.

I've had quite a bit of experience documenting failure modes of complex software and hardware systems and have been directly involved in their design. It is beyond belief that Boeing could produce a control system that did not have multiple sanity checks for its control inputs. It makes me reluctant to ever fly on a Boeing aircraft again. 

WebWorks ePublisher 2019.1 Released

Quadralay has announced the release of WebWorks ePublisher 2019.1. The release notes and documentation are online.

This release includes support for 32-bit FrameMaker 2019, improved performance (definitely noticeable when viewing the online docs) and several enhancements to the Reverb 2.0 format.

I was a happy user of Quadralay's WebWorks products for many years and recommend them highly for their stability and excellent technical support.

2018 Nebula Awards Announced

The winners of the 2018 Nebula Awards have been announced. They are voted on by members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

To no one's surprise (I haven't seen so much buzz about a novel in years), Mary Robinette Kowal won the Best Novel award for The Calculating Stars. I expect her to win a Hugo for it later this year. 

Locus Magazine has the full list of awards. 

Off for the Weekend

Monday is Victoria Day in Canada, which means it's a long weekend for most people. It's known informally as the May 24 weekend, because that's Queen Victoria's birthday. It's traditionally the first weekend of gardening season, depending on the weather of course, which finally seems to be turning into something akin to summer (it's been a terrible spring here so far).

So I'm taking the weekend off. Posts will resume on Tuesday.

Featured Links - May 17, 2019

Links to things that I found interesting but didn't want to do a full post about.

• Ready to Pounce. As a cat owner, I found this article on scientific research on cats just the cat's meow. 
• Replacements for Adobe apps. Unfortunately, FrameMaker is not included.
• Get lost in the new Earth Timelapse, now on mobile.  Watching the urban sprawl take over the farmland north of us is pretty sobering.
• New Video Metasearch Features a Guy and His Cat. PeteyVid is a video metasearch engine with some useful features. 
• How biotech went from “no way” to payday in the cannabis business. Another market ripe for disruption.
• Ubuntu 19.04: The Disco Dingo arrives and will really make your IT dept. happy.
• What Does a Particle Collider Sound Like? I have wondered about that. 

12 Things I Learned In Type School

I didn't realize that you could go to school to study typography, although it makes sense. Peter Cho did and has written an article about twelve things he learned in type school. Some of them are what anyone would expect to learn about themselves after an intensive study program; others are about some of the finer points of typography. I found it fascinating.

[ 8 ] The importance of counter shapes

Counters are the shapes inside letters, both closed shapes like e and o, but also the concave regions in m and n. It follows from what we learned about positive and negative space that counters are important, but their importance in establishing a visual system extends beyond a single font style. In a workshop in June, Andy Clymer explained how punch cuts were tapered, and the same punch could be used for a larger size by cutting deeper into the lead. When designing different weights of a family, you should think like a punchcutter and preserve the counter shapes so the letterforms feel related.

Sasha Tochilovsky also brought up a related idea in his workshop in March. When you’re pairing different fonts to use in a design, you can compare the counter shapes in the letter a to be a signal of whether the faces will work well together.

How to Automate Google Sheets with Macros

I've been using Google Sheets in preference to Microsoft Excel for some personal files. For what I need, the simplicity of Google Sheets compared to Excel makes it the better choice. But I have one spreadsheet that I was considering using Excel for. I want hide a bunch of columns in an export file from LibraryThing and I would have to do it every time I create a new export file. So I was going to try to write an Excel macro, which I have not done before. (I know how to write Word macros, but have never done it in Excel).

However, it turns out that Google Sheets has a macro recorder, which I didn't know before reading this article.

When you record a macro in Google Sheets, it automatically creates an Apps Script with all the code to replicate your actions for you. This means you can create complex macros without knowing how to write code. The next time you run it, Sheets will do everything you did when you recorded the macro. Essentially, you’re teaching Google Sheets how to manipulate a document to your liking with a single command.

If I needed to do anything complex with a spreadsheet macro, I probably would use Excel. I'm much more comfortable with Microsoft's VBA than Google's AppScript. But it's nice to have the recording capability in Sheets to automate simple tasks.

Now, if Google would give us that capability in Docs, I'd be much more inclined to use Docs instead of Word.

Useful Chrome Extensions for Web Developers

Google Chrome's extensions are one of its most useful features. If you are doing web development, there are a plethora of extensions that can make your life easier. Hongkiat.com has compiled a list of more than 30 extensions that you might want to take a look at.

More than a few of these should be useful to any technical writers producing online documentation with tools like RoboHelp or WebWorks ePublisher. I would look at Web Developer and CSS Viewer to start.

Evil Clippy Is Bad News For Word Users

Word macros have been a security problem ever since the days of Melissa, one of the first widespread computer viruses. Since then, Microsoft has made Word more secure and many organizations lock down the macro capabilities of Word so that users either can't use them or explicitly have to enable macros.

However (Isn't there always a however?), security researchers have developed a new tool, Evil Clippy, that's capable of bypassing all of Word's current security controls to insert malicious code. Here's the TL;DR from BoingBoing:

Evil Clippy comes from Dutch security researchers Outflank: "a tool which assists red teamers and security testers in creating malicious MS Office documents. Amongst others, Evil Clippy can hide VBA macros, stomp VBA code (via p-code) and confuse popular macro analysis tools. It runs on Linux, OSX and Windows." Evil Clippy's magic depends in part on some awesomely terrible undocumented Office features, including "VBA Stomping": "if we know the version of MS Office of a target system (e.g. Office 2016, 32 bit), we can replace our malicious VBA source code with fake code, while the malicious code will still get executed via p-code. In the meantime, any tool analyzing the VBA source code (such as antivirus) is completely fooled."

It's notable that Evil Clippy relies on undocumented VBA features. From the authors' post:

Evil Clippy only scratches the surface of issues resulting from the gap between official Microsoft specifications on VBA macros (MS-OVBA) and its actual implementation in MS Office. Since malicious macros are one of the most common methods for initial compromise by threat actors, proper defense against such macros is crucial. We believe that the lack of adequate specifications of how macros actually work in MS Office severely hinders the work of antivirus vendors and security analysts. This blog post serves as a call to Microsoft to change this for the better.

As far as I can tell from reading the post, the techniques that Evil Clippy uses can bypass most current security tools. That may change as vendors update their products. In the meantime, the authors suggest several techniques for mitigating the danger. One of them is disabling macros in documents downloaded from the Internet. I am not sure how this would affect users of web-based tools like Sharepoint and Google Drive.

In any case, it's a dangerous world out there, and it just got more dangerous. And maybe harder for technical writers using Word macros.

New Words Added to Merriam-Webster in April 2019

The English language is constantly changing and dictionaries need to be updated to keep up. Merriam-Webster has published an additional list of words that were added to the dictionary in April 2019.  Some words are new to the dictionary; some are new meanings for existing entries, like snowflake and purple.

It all begins, in each case, with evidence of words in use. Each word follows its own path at its own pace before its use is widespread enough to be included in a dictionary. We watch as words move from specialized contexts to more general use and we make citations for each word in order to draft our definitions. This means, in other words, that we have the receipts (in a manner of speaking).

History of the Capital AI & Market Failures in the Attention Economy

The article that this post is about came to me as a Twitter recommendation from both Tim O'Reilly and Charles Stross. That was more than enough to pique my interest. O'Reilly said: "This is far and away the best summary of the argument for capitalism as an #AI with a flawed objective function  that I’ve ever read. I love it."

He's right. 

History of the Capital AI & Market Failures in the Attention Economy is one of those articles that will likely be read and discussed for at least the rest of this year. It's long, opinionated, and well researched.

This is a lengthy discussion, so I’ll begin with a summary.

The basic idea in this post is to consider capitalism as a highly efficient objective function (or “AI”) with its parameters optimized for the satisfaction of our short term desires rather than our long term interests.

Paranoia about runaway feedback loops – in consumer capitalism, artificial intelligence, mass media, ‘Wrestlemania politics,’ etc – ultimately stems from the inscrutability of the emergent behavior of these complex systems to the individual actors and observers operating within them.

Rather than responding with Luddite / anarchist nihilism, we should remember that technological and social systems like these have dramatically reduced our exposure to the unpredictability of the natural world and greatly improved living conditions on a number of dimensions over the past few centuries.

At the same time, we should not ignore warning signs of a dystopian future, nor should we hope that a ‘personnel change’ of institutional leaders will solve our problems.

It's a long article. If you don't have time to read the whole thing, skip directly the author's Practical Recommendations. This is one of them:

(5) Set boundary parameters around economic growth and disparity. Instead of incessantly bickering about the dystopias that result from either raw economic growth without redistribution (which inevitably leads to extreme disparity) or the state enforcement of absolute equality (which leads to either stagnation or totalitarianism), we should define policies that moderate between these extremes and land us in explicit, acceptable ranges. We could, for example, set parameters such that whenever the economy is growing as a whole, we have a redistribution slider which ensures inequality decreases at the same time (see the 𝜏 parameter in this post).

But it's better to take the time and read the whole thing. It's worth it.

Thirteen Mintues to the Moon

As has been noted here and many places elsewhere, this year is the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. To mark the occasion, the BBC has created a new podcast series, 13 Minutes to the Moon that features interviews with many of the people who helped to send the astronauts to the moon and some of the astronauts themselves.

In total, no fewer than 400,000 people were involved in Project Apollo. Nearly all of them felt deeply connected to the mission and, although only a handful of people finally flew to the Moon, in a very real sense the factory workers, engineers, technicians and scientists that worked as part of the Apollo programme felt that, on 20 July 1969, part of them landed on the Moon, too.

We wanted to tell all of those stories, framed by the drama of the last 13 minutes of descent before touchdown on the lunar surface.

That period of the mission was rife with crisis and, as Armstrong would later testify, "rampant with unknowns".

I've subscribed to the podcast and will be listening for new episodes each Monday.

A Tribute to John Brunner

John who? I suspect that's what most people reading this blog will be thinking when they see the post title.

John Brunner was a British science fiction writer who had a fairly successful career that probably peaked in the late 1960s with the publication of the Hugo-winning novel, Stand on Zanzibar. I was an avid Brunner fan at the time it was published, having discovered his work as a teenager, and have read and re-read many of his novels. 

The BBC has published an appreciation of Brunner and his work as part of a new series about books that predicted the future.

He fed his powerful imagination – of which vivid nightmares seem to have been a lifelong manifestation – with journals such as New Society and The New Scientist, and if some of his predictions now read like wacky sci-fi clichés, others have proven spot on. For instance, in his 1962 novella Listen! The Stars! he conjured up the ‘stardropper’, an addictive portable-media-player-like gizmo. In 1972, he published one of his most pessimistic novels, The Sheep Look Up, which prophesies a future blighted by extreme pollution and environmental catastrophe. And his 1975 novel, The Shockwave Rider, created a computer hacker hero before the world knew what one was. It also envisaged the emergence of computer viruses, something that early computer scientists dismissed as impossible. He even coined the use of the word ‘worm’ to describe them.

Brunner is a good choice for that; while he may have got the technological details wrong (the "internet" of The Shockwave Rider is based on touch-tone phone codes), he nailed the social and cultural aspects (hackers, for example). 

Stand on Zanzibar remains his crowning achievement and is still readable and relevant today. 

Though it divided critics on publication, Zanzibar has come to be regarded as a classic of New Wave sci-fi, better known for its style than its content. This seems a pity. When an excerpt appeared in New Worlds magazine in November 1967, an editorial claimed that it was the first novel in its field to create, in every detail, “a possible society of the future”.

There’s irony in some of what Brunner got wrong. He assumed, for instance, that the US would have at last figured out how to provide adequate, inexpensive medical care for all by 2010. Other inaccuracies are sci-fi staples – guns that fire lightning bolts; deep-sea mining camps; a Moon base. And yet, in ways minor and major, that ‘future society’ nevertheless seems rather familiar today. For example, it features an organisation very similar to the European Union; it casts China as America’s greatest rival; its phones have connections to a Wikipedia-style encyclopaedia; people casually pop Xanax-style ‘tranks’; documents are run off on laser printers; and Detroit has become a shuttered ghost town and incubator of a new kind of music oddly similar to the actual Detroit techno movement of the 1990s.

The ebook of Stand on Zanzibar is on sale now, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. I guarantee that you will never forget Shalmaneser, the intelligent and possibly self-aware computer: "Every now and again there passes through his circuits a pulse which carries the cybernetic equivalent of the phrase, “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got.“

Featured Links - May 12, 2019

Links to things that I found interesting but didn't want to do a full post about.

• How to Use Snapseed: 10 Tips for Better Snapseed Photo Editing. I use Snapseed a lot on my phone, and this article is a good guide to using it to improving your photos. 
• Microsoft Reboots the PowerToys for Windows 10. Some of these should be useful. 
• Google Maps' New AR Directions Are Pretty Cool. I wish I'd had this when we were in London last year.
• The Obsessive, Tumultuous Lives of SpaceX Rocket Chasers. I would have liked some mention of the ones that track the test site in Texas.
• A short video on the story of mathematicians and Hagoromo chalk and how it's imminent demise turned them into chalk dealers. 
• The Year Of Linux On The Desktop – at last! Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 brings the Linux kernel into Windows.
• Australia printed 46 million $50 notes with a typo. Responsibilty, indeed.

Unbuilt Cities: What Might Have Been

I've always liked alternate history stories.  Modern digital technology has made it possible to create realistic views of what might have been, and The Guardian has created some of the best that I've seen.

The Guardian has a series of articles called Unbuilt Cities. I was impressed by two that use a clickable overlay on the pictures: click on the left and you get the original or current view, click on the right and you see the alternate rendering. It works extremely well.

Have a look at Trafalgar pyramid? A look at an alternative London and A totem in Times Square: New York as it might have looked – in pictures. (I would link to one of the images but it doesn't seem possible to create a direct link).

The rest of the articles on the Unbuilt Cities page are also fascinating and worth a look, but the two I've linked to are outstanding.

Jeff Bezos Unveils Lunar Plans for Blue Origin

SpaceX isn't the only private company with ambitious plans for space exploration. Blue Origin, funded by Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, may have gotten off to a slower start than SpaceX, but their plans are at least as ambitious.

Yesterday Jeff Bezos unveiled plans for a lunar lander and eventually colonies on the moon and in space.

Near the end of his speech, Bezos praised the goal set by Vice President Mike Pence of landing humans on the Moon by 2024. "I love this," Bezos said. "It's the right thing to do. We can help meet that timeline but only because we started three years ago. It's time to go back to the Moon—this time to stay."

In a configuration with "stretch tanks," Bezos said Blue Moon could carry up to 6.5 tons to the lunar surface, and this would be large enough for a crewed ascent vehicle. This aligns with NASA's vision for a multi-stage lunar lander that involves both a descent vehicle and then a different spacecraft for humans—the ascent vehicle—that will launch back from the surface of the Moon and return the crew to low lunar orbit. Blue Origin will bid on the descent vehicle portion of NASA's lunar lander contract.

Based on their progress so far, I think that Bezos' plans for Blue Origin are ambitious but doable. His long-term goals might be another matter, involving building O'Neill colonies in space.

I don't see that idea being any more possible than Elon Musk's plan for Mars colonies. If had the resources of Musk or Bezos, I'd be loooking at lunar colonies instead.

5 Things to Consider When Creating Your CSS Style Guide

During my career as a technical writer, I've worked on several style guides for my groups and had some input into coding standards for developers. It has never occurred to me that a style guide might be required for CSS, but I can understand the need, although I'd consider referring to one as a coding standards guide rather than a style guide.

In any case, this article from LogRocket has some solid advice for creating such a guide. I can see that it would be especially useful for larger groups where writers might have to work with tools that are heavily CSS-based like Flare or WebWorks ePublisher.

A CSS style guide is a set of standards and rules on how to use and write CSS code. It often contains global branding definitions like colors and typography and a set of reusable components for building a more consistent and maintainable project.

CSS style guides should be considered an equal citizen of every project requirement.

Designing a New Mobile Experience for the Guardian

The Guardian is one of the best British newspapers, and they have a strong online presence. They're also turning a profit, without a paywall, which is a rarity in the newspaper business. Clearly they're doing something right.

This article describes the process that The Guardian went through in updating its mobile website. While much of the article is specific to the newspaper business in the UK, there's quite a bit that would apply to any technical communication group planning on developing or redesigning their mobile presence.

The recommendations from the article are particularly relevant to technical communication:

• Make sure the website looks and feels like a digital product and not a print newspaper;
• Innovate not only by investing in technology and new products, but also by providing training and continuous support to journalists;
• Rethink the newsroom structure: hire as many developers, data scientists and designers as possible;
• Do not be afraid to experiment: Build, Measure, Learn (Ries, 2011);
• Be humble and open: the world has changed, business has changed — you should change, too;
• Always involve the end-user in product decisions. Talk and, more importantly, listen to customers on a regular basis.

2019 Locus Award Finalists

Locus, the news magazine of the science fiction field, has published the list of finalists for its annual Locus Awards. They are voted on by readers and subscribers to the magazine and are always a good source of quality reading material.

Here are the finalists for Science Fiction Novel.

• Record of a Spaceborn Few, Becky Chambers (Harper Voyager US; Hodder & Stoughton)
• The Calculating Stars, Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)
• If Tomorrow Comes, Nancy Kress (Tor)
• Revenant Gun, Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris US; Solaris UK)
• Blackfish City, Sam J. Miller (Ecco; Orbit UK)
• Embers of War, Gareth L. Powell (Titan US; Titan UK)
• Elysium Fire, Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz; Orbit US)
• Red Moon, Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
• Unholy Land, Lavie Tidhar (Tachyon)
• Space Opera, Catherynne M. Valente (Saga)

Out of those, I've read two, The Calculating Stars and Elysium Fire, both of which were excellent. I was glad to see that Ian McDonald's superb Time Was on the novella list. Winners will be announced at the end of June.

Featured Links - May 8, 2019

Links to things that I found interesting but didn't want to do a full post about.

• The Ramanujan Summation: 1 + 2 + 3 + ⋯ + ∞ = -1/12? Some very simple but completely non-intuitive math to amaze you.
• After Death Occurs: A Checklist. This could save a lot of trouble at a bad time.
• How to Spot Fake Reviews on Amazon. Some useful tips here. 
• Still Using Windows 7? How to Upgrade to Windows 10 Before 2020. Or switch to Linux. 
• How YouTube Could Reduce Its Carbon Footprint. It's bigger than Amsterdam's.
• A Martian Dust Devil Swept Right Over NASA’s InSight Lander. They got some good science observations out of it.

Microsoft Word to Get AI-Like Grammar Checker

Microsoft will be adding AI-based grammar checking features to Word 365. 

The functionality aims to take on similar platforms like Grammarly and Google Docs. The Ideas feature outlines simple errors, and highlights sentences that can be rephrased to improve clarity. Ideas will also be beneficial when reading, according to Microsoft. The feature can explain acronyms, outline the main points of what you’re reading and also estimate reading time. These features will give readers the ability to effectively skim through pieces of text.

I'm not sure how I feel about that. I do use the grammar checker in Word, but I have turned off many of the things that it looks for.

Another upcoming feature makes me very twitchy.

 Microsoft also announced a Word Designer feature that will allow users to style their documents and tables.

Given how Microsoft has managed to make using paragraph and character styles more difficult with each release,  I can't imagine what they're going to do now.

Science Fiction Doesn't Have To Be Dystopian

The publication of a new story by Ted Chiang is always an event in the science fiction field; the publication of a new collection of his stories is a major event. He has won four Nebula awards, four Hugo awards, and his story, The Story of Your Life was made into the movie, Arrival. And for a bonus, he's a technical writer.

The New Yorker has a review of his new collection, Exhalation, written by none other than Joyce Carol Oates.

In his new collection, “Exhalation” (Knopf), his second, Chiang again presents elaborate thought experiments in narrative modes that initially seem familiar. Contemporary issues relating to bioethics, virtual reality, free will and determinism, time travel, and the uses of robotic forms of A.I. are addressed in plain, forthright prose. If Chiang’s stories can strike us as riddles, concerned with asking rather than with answering difficult questions, there is little ambiguity about his language. When an entire story is metaphorical, focussed on a single surreal image, it’s helpful that individual sentences possess the windowpane transparency that George Orwell advocated as a prose ideal.

I've read several of the stories in the collection and I cannot recommend it highly enough. I completely agree with Oates' assessment: "The stories in “Exhalation” are mostly not so magically inventive as those in Chiang’s first collection, but each is still likely to linger in the memory the way riddles may linger—teasing, tormenting, illuminating, thrilling."

Free CSS Handbook

Developer Flavio Copes has made his CSS Handbook freely available. It's written for developers and at 173 pages is a good reference for brushing up on some of the new CSS features.

I wrote this article to help you quickly learn CSS and get familiar with the advanced CSS topics.

CSS is often quickly dismissed as an easy thing to learn by developers, or one thing you just pick up when you need to quickly style a page or app. Due to this reason, it’s often learned on-the-fly, or we learn things in isolation right when we have to use them. This can be a huge source of frustration when we find that the tool does not simply do what we want.

This article will help you get up to speed with CSS and get an overview of the main modern features you can use to style your pages and apps.

You can download it in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI formats by subscribing to his free newsletter. He also has a series of handbooks on JavaScript and related tools.

Apollo 11 Manual for Sale

The manual that the Apollo 11 astronauts used during their lunar landing is up for sale this summer. I was tempted to title this post "If I had a million dollars", but a million wouldn't be enough.

This lunar module timeline book was used by the two U.S. astronauts to land Eagle, the lunar module that allowed for exploration of the moon’s surface. This rare cardstock-covered manual contains 44 three-hole-punched pages of detailed instructions for the launch and descent of Eagle.

The time period that the book covers is the entire Lunar Module Eagle portion of the Apollo 11 mission, says Christina Geiger, head of books and manuscripts at Christie’s America.

his step-by-step manual offers rare insight into the process of conducting the first moon landing, particularly the fact that the NASA astronauts weren’t completely certain their mission could be completed. In the book, there’s a section that gives details based on whether they decide to stay or not stay on the moon. “It’s almost like a choose your own adventure,” Geiger says. “They have a box with steps to abort the mission [if necessary].”

I hope that whoever has deep enough pockets to purchase this significant piece of space history will put it on public display.

Some Design and Typography Articles

Here are some interesting articles about design and typography.

• The Value of Multi-Typeface Design. Technical writers tend to minimize the number of typefaces in their documentation, but there are times when it's appropriate to go the other way.
• How to redesign a 175-year-old newspaper. The Economist isn't a newspaper, but the article is still a good read. 
• The Magical, Surprising History of Serifs. "Once viewed as uncivilized, sans serif typefaces somehow became the epitome of streamlined efficiency."
• If Your Favorite Typefaces Were Celebrities. Who would be Comic Sans?

Featured Links - May 5, 2019

Links to things that I found interesting but didn't want to do a full post about.

• 8 Tricks to Improve the Picture on Your New TV. You might want to look at this if Game of Thrones looks way too dark.
• The Windows 10 Settings Guide. A good guide to Windows 10's often confusing settings screens.
• Week One with the Pixel 3 XL. Paul Thurrott reports on his experience using the Pixel 3 XL phone after one week.
• The Dark Forest Theory of the Universe. An unpleasant answer to the question raised by the Fermi Paradox.
• As Big Pharma Abandons Antibiotic Research, Scientists Turn to Graves, Lizards, and Fungus for New Cures. They're getting desperate.
• Botanical Sexism Cultivates Home-Grown Allergies. The desire for "litter-free" plants is making our allergies worse.
• What Happens When You Adjust Your TV's Settings for Darker Scenes. Like for last week's Game of Thrones.

Surfing the Web Without CSS

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are one of the best features of the web. CSS lets you (mostly) separate your presentation format from your content's code. I've been uisng CSS almost since it was developed in the mid-1990s, and I can't imagine doing anything on the web without it.

Still, there are good reasons for wanting to see what a site looks like without CSS; the main one being to check accessibility features. So it's probably a good idea to test your website without CSS.

Jon Kantner of CSS-Tricks wondered what would happen if he browsed to several major sites with CSS disabled. The results were interesting, to say the least.

CSS is a key component to the modern web. As we’ve seen up to this point, there are a number of sites that become next to un-unusable without it — and we’re counting some of the most recognizable and used sites in that mix. What we’ve seen is that, at best, the primary purpose for a site can still be accomplished, but there are hurdles along the way. Things like:

• missing or semantically incorrect skip links
• links that run together
• oversized images that require additional scrolling
• empty elements, like list items and button labels

He then goes on to provide best practices to follow to make sure your site works when CSS is disabled or not available. 

This is a good article and I learned a lot from reading it.

Interview with the Head of the Merril Collection

The Merril Collection is the science fiction and fantasy special collection of the Toronto Public Library. It's currently housed on the third floor of the Lillian H. Smith Library on College Street. My wife worked there for a while before we had our first child and I've been a friend of the former head librarian, Lorna Toolis, for many years.

Lorna retired last year and her job went to Sephora Henderson. Toronto's International Festival of Authors has published a short interview with her.

SH: In 1970, the Toronto Public Library accepted a donation of 5,000 items from the personal collection of Judith Merril, who was a science fiction author and editor.  The collection was housed in other, smaller locations before its current location at 239 College St., and was originally named the Spaced Out Library.  In 1995, the collection was re-named after the donor and has been the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy ever since. It has grown to [house] over 80,000 items.

The collection consists primarily of fiction materials in the speculative fiction genres – science fiction, fantasy and related sub-genres, but there is also a small collection of non-fiction materials, the world’s largest RPG collection in a public setting, and over 5,000 graphic novels, pulp magazines, periodicals and art.

We have rare and antiquarian books alongside the most recently published materials in the genre – our goal is to collect one of everything published in English.

If you are an SF fan and in Toronto, you should most definitely pay the Collection a visit.

Hope for The Orville, Season 3

I just finished watching the last three episodes of The Orville's second season and very much enjoyed them. If you're not familiar with The Orville, it's a science fiction show on Fox, very much in the spirit of the original Star Trek. I liked it much more than CBS' Star Trek reboot, Star Trek: Discovery, although the ending of the second season gave me some hope that the show might improve.

I did have some trouble getting past The Orville's comedic element, but it's much preferable to Discovery's dreary seriousness.

I'm hoping that Fox will renew The Orville for a third season. io9 has an article listing what they'd like to see in the next season, and I agree with most of it, except for the musical episode. Here's one point, about the villains.

The Kaylon, whose goal is to annihilate all biological life in the universe, will certainly return if there’s a season three. We’ve visited their homeworld, we’ve seen what their well-armed ships can do (not to mention the guns that pop out of their heads), and the season two finale showed us what the universe might look like if their plan came close to completion. But what will their next move be, other than just showing back up and trying to take out the Orville again? And how will the show use Isaac in a different way than it did in season two, which saw him cruelly betraying his crewmates (including Claire, who was kinda his girlfriend at the time) before he realized he couldn’t allow his fellow Kaylons to succeed?

The Orvilles’ other big bad, the Krill, signed a peace treaty with the Planetary Union after fighting alongside humans in the battle against the Kaylon above Earth. But it’s a tentative agreement with a war-obsessed race that will no doubt hit some snags as time passes. The Orville has already had a plot very similar to one seen on Star Trek: Discovery, in which a Krill disguised herself as a human as part of a revenge scheme, but let’s hope The Orville doesn’t take any further inspiration from Trek, at least when it comes to the show’s recent, specific villains. That means no Harry Mudd equivalent, no riffs on Section 31, and no mirror universe. Please!

The freeCodeCamp Medium Publication Editor Handbook

If you're thinking about writing articles for publication, the editor of freeCodeCamp.org, published by Medium.com, has written a handbook that will help you plan and organize your articles. While it's written for writers working at Medium.com, it should be helpful to any freelancer writing an article.

Here's a small part:

Regardless of the type of story — news, feature, tutorial — they should all strive for the same virtues:

Substance. The story should bring something meaningful to the table. A writer’s story about the Commodore 64 their parents bought for them in the 1980s might be of great interest to them personally, but will it be relevant to a typical reader? Will they walk away with something useful? On the other hand, pretty much all of our readers would benefit from learning more about the job interview process, or gaining a better understanding of how CSS works.

Accessibility. The story should be as easy for a layperson to understand as possible. There are practical limits to how simple an explanation of a mathematical concept can be, but few writers even begin to approach such limits. A thoughtful communicator can channel their inner Einstein or Feynman and make many complicated concepts relatively easy to understand. But this does take effort.

Brevity. People are busy. A story should be as short as possible, but no shorter. We can often trim fat without sacrificing much in the way of meaning. We publish plenty of longer stories, like my story on the history of the open internet. I spent 3 months researching it, and it was originally going to be a book, but I was able to cut it down to the point that I could express it in a 26-minute read. Maybe there’s room to cut it down even further.

Build Your Own Hackintosh

It is possible to convert a Windows-based PC into a computer that can run Apple's MacOS, what people call a Hackintosh. However, it's not a process for the faint of heart or technically inexperienced.

On Motherboard, Ernie Smith has a (really) long and (really, really) technical article that explains what you'll need and what you have to do.

I can speak from experience here because I did all the hard work myself already. As frustrated by the keyboard and the price as by the fact that nothing was upgradeable on the current generation of MacBook Pros, I went on this journey myself a year ago—and made it out on the other side much more knowledgeable about why MacOS is a great, quite flexible operating system, often (and unfortunately) placed in a not-so-perfect machine. I put in the time, offered the occasional helping hand on the forums, did a bit of research on the culture of Hackintosh, and gained a great appreciation for the process.

I’ve been using a Hackintosh laptop as a daily driver for a year. Now, I’m sharing my insights here.

Why am I posting this, when there is no chance that I am ever going to try it? (I haven't even installed Linux on my PC). Because it's a very clear, well written piece of technical documentation.

No, Electric Cars Do Not Pollute More Than Gas Cars

Every once in a while, I come across an article promoting the idea that electric cars produce more pollution than gas cars, because the the energy required to make their batteries is so great. On the surface, it might sound reasonable, but it's wrong. The latest example is an editorial in the Wall Street Journal.

The idea is demolished in this Jalopnik article, which cites several sources, including the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Let’s go to the Union of Concerned Scientists, which looked at this non-issue back in 2015, and found that the whole “batteries produce more carbon dioxide to manufacture” argument goes straight out the window and down into the pit of hell itself as soon as you drive anywhere (emphasis mine):

A full-size long-range (265 miles per charge) BEV, with its larger battery, adds about six tons of emissions, which increases manufacturing emissions by 68 percent over the gasoline version. But this electric vehicle results in 53 percent lower overall emissions compared with a similar gasoline vehicle (see Figure ES-2). In other words, the extra emissions associated with electric vehicle production are rapidly negated by reduced emissions from driving. Comparing an average midsize midrange BEV with an average midsize gasoline-powered car, it takes just 4,900 miles of driving to “pay back”—i.e., offset—the extra global warming emissions from producing the BEV. Similarly, it takes 19,000 miles with the full-size long-range BEV compared with a similar gasoline car. Based on typical usages of these vehicles, this amounts to about six months’ driving for the midsize midrange BEV and 16 months for the full-size long-range BEV.

The Wall Street Journal should know better, but they probably get too much revenue from their corporate sponsors.

Increasing Your Odds on Lottery Scratch Tickets

Occasionally I like to play a lottery scratch ticket. I know the odds of winning a big prize aren't great, but they do have some entertainment value. LifeHacker points out that state lotteries in the US generally have pages that show you what prizes are still unclaimed for each type of game. If you're going to waste a few bucks on a ticket, you might as well pick the one that has the best odds of winning, even if they are infinitesimal.

Here's the link to the corresponding page for Ontario's OLG.